'Cloud-based computer-aided design (CAD) collaboration tool Sunglass, which debuted at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC in May, is today officially announcing its public launch and is unveiling a new API for direct integration with major CAD design tools, like SolidWorks, SketchUp, Processing, and Rhino. The CAD ecosystem now also integrates with cloud storage players, like Box and Dropbox, which combined with its hooks into design tools, makes it far easier for users to add projects or initiate new collaboration sessions in the cloud.'
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Hi Danny, WebGL is kind of the "new hotness" at the moment. But it has very spotty support in browsers, no support in IE and not in a lot of other places as well:

http://worldcadaccess.typepad.com/blog/2012/06/running-browsercad-on-ipad.html
http://worldcadaccess.typepad.com/blog/2012/06/running-browsercad-on-android.html
http://worldcadaccess.typepad.com/blog/2012/06/the-future-of-browsercad.html

It's not really something that would work to use in MoI anyway since MoI works as a regular desktop application and is not set up to run totally inside of a browser. Running everything inside of the browser would either involve a huge port of all back-end program code to JavaScript or a major move to run "in the cloud". Either one of those would be a major many-years long experiment and so not likely to happen, and I think that MoI is more suited to be a regular desktop app anyway.

- Michael

Hi Michael

for me this is really a good news....I think cloud computing hide many shadows and pitfalls in the future for the cad users (also from economic perspective):

http://worldcadaccess.typepad.com/blog/2012/06/for-autodesk-switching-to-the-cloud-is-bigger-than-the-90s-switch-to-windows.html
http://whatwrongwiththecadcampress.blogspot.it/p/cloud-computing-scam.html

Moi is fantastic as is ;

Amen!

The Cloud's only real purpose is control. So that large corporations can 'say so' and tell you what to buy and where to put your stuff.

So much control to be shoved down a fragile fiber-optic line. Last year, a backhoe took out a fiber line and put a whole county out of internet, phone and 911 for three weeks.
Yes, the big push is for everyone in mankind to own tablet devices and to do everything through the Cloud.
The gamers are all online - but they still need desktops with quad GPU's.

I see that AutoDesk wants to reach for that 'absolute power' thing.

Anyone remember the anime movie Akira? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akira_(film)

That giant blob-guy at the end that absorbed all that junk and finally got too powerful and bloated,
then Tokyo exploded (again), and Tetsuo ends up going to the great beyond! --- a possible fate of 3DS Max. eh? ;-)

Will it be possible that someday you may run MoI on a 'desktop' but the OS guts and all your operating moves has to go back and forth between your PC and M$?

It wasn't that long ago when applications that ran in the web browser were simply called "web applications" and that "cloud" thing techies were talking about was strictly about renting utility - processing power, storage, content delivery and so on - on the cheap.


I wonder how long it will take for all those marketing types to catch on that people are becoming increasingly aware of vendor lock-in and how that figures into their software choices.

In that aspect, the ever geeky Google is on the forefront; their "Data Liberation Front", despite being low-key and decidedly on the goofy side, is a clear attempt to convince people who Google's cloud is *not* an attempt on locking their data in.

Hi Mike,

> The Cloud's only real purpose is control. So that large corporations can
> 'say so' and tell you what to buy and where to put your stuff.

There is definitely some of that in play, and really one big draw is not just to boss you around but also to be able to harvest and analyze your data in some way to be able to deliver targeted ads.

But also another factor yet is the cross-platform appeal, the idea that when your stuff is being run on the cloud and the UI being delivered to you through a web page, it's easier for you to access that from any number of devices or different machines. That part when it works can certainly be useful and if you use any type of webmail like hotmail or gmail then you're actually already participating in this style of cloud computing, they just don't charge you for it and instead focus on the revenue from advertisers.

Things that are more CPU intensive (which many things involving CAD can be) are not quite such an easy fit for that sort of model because you have to maintain a lot of server capacity and managing all of that is a lot of work and basically needs some kind of team dedicated just to that part of the infrastructure. And basically maintaining the equivalent of one full desktop machine's computing power on the server side is not very cost effective. For things like e-mail that requires such a low amount of CPU processing for every individual one that just one server machine can handle stuff for some thousands and thousands of users, while CAD stuff would have something like 2 users max out all the resources on one server machine already.

- Michael

It looks like that Sunglass.io thing is possibly more about some kind of online repository for models with an integrated viewer system and an API for developers to be able to connect to it. At least that's as far as I can tell, there is not really much information about it on their site.

Some news articles are describing it as some sort of "CAD on the cloud" but it might be more like "Viewing CAD files on the cloud", and viewing files is much different than creating things. From what I can tell so far seems to be a lot of hype for something that's fundamentally a viewer system, but maybe I'm just not understanding its capabilities.

Those news articles talking about "democratizing CAD" are way over blown if it's just a viewer.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

> Those news articles talking about "democratizing CAD" are way over blown if it's just a viewer.

Totally agree! It's just a viewer, and I was quite surprised by everyone's reaction to this, everyone! Just chill! I'm not suggesting MoI to be a web app at all and I'm not one for cloud computing either, some online storage is pretty handy but it look's like they call that 'cloud computing' too, new buzz word for sure.

When I posted this my only thought was; It'll be cool to have a Web collaboration viewer for MoI, since Sunglass was releasing the API.

Is this a possibility Michael? As you know, I know very little about coding.

Cheers

Hi Danny,

> When I posted this my only thought was; It'll be cool to have a Web collaboration
> viewer for MoI, since Sunglass was releasing the API.

Yeah it might work well as a 3D viewer for showing people your models. Although it's a bit of a tough call compared to say Acrobat since it doesn't work for anyone using IE, that's actually a pretty substantial stumbling block. You'd have to tell some roughly 30% of people who you want to share with that they have to install a different web browser in order to see it...


> Is this a possibility Michael? As you know, I know very little about coding.

Well sure, everything is a possibility! ;) But it usually takes a fair amount of effort to both study and test and gain familiarity with a new API so it's not too likely that I'd be able to gather enough time to focus on working on that anytime too soon...

I'd be kind of inclined to wait a bit and see if it's turning out to be useful for other programs for a while first.

I'm also not sure what is involved with the plug-ins anyway - if it's just a method to publish a file to their web server, that's something that you should be able to do with their web app directly anyway rather than actually needing a special in-program plug-in to do it. I would think that you should be able to use MoI with it already if it just takes common model data types.

This kind of falls into some of the same area as special purpose rendering file format support - I'm not really that keen on implementing a ton of app-specific file formats all of which contain the same kind of data in them for sending data to renderers, I try to focus more on supporting some key common formats and then it's up to a bunch of different renderers to support those same common formats well. That's just fundamentally more efficient for me than trying to make 30 or 40 different kinds of individual app-specific file formats exporters from MoI. This seems to be in the same general category - if it's just a file viewer, I'd think that you should be able to just upload some regular CAD files with it without any special formats required. If that's not the case then it's something that Sunglass should implement themselves then they'll get a wide amount of support automatically rather than requiring a specialized plug-in for every different system to be implemented first.

This is all kind of speculation from me though since they don't seem to have much of any public accessible information on their web site so I'm not really 100% sure what their stuff actually does.

But for example you can put stuff you made with MoI up on GrabCAD and I didn't have to do any special plug-in for that, you just upload your regular model files and then they are up there, right? I'm not sure exactly what would be gained by making special plugins.

- Michael

Sunglass.io has just announced the release of plugins to import your models into the web-based collaboration and CAD-app platform. There are a set of plugins available for SolidWorks, Rhino, Processing and SketchUp along with direct integration of both Dropbox and Box.


SUNGLASS.IO PLUGINS

This is pretty big. This marks the first, direct 3D software to WebGL import made available to the public. No doubt software vendors are working on it for their own file formats, but the start-ups in the 3D software space are showing how much faster they can move. Sunglass just landed 1.7 Million in funding March 2012, adding developers to help make this functionality happen, and the platform currently supports 44 different file formats. I have no doubt that other web-collab players like TeamPlatform or GrabCAD will be the next to offer plugins that import 3D/CAD data directly to their project collaboration site.

The Sunglass.io plugins is a one-button click that pushes your 3D models direct to the Web UI for sharing, commenting and some basic editing. We spoke to Nitin Rao, co-founder of Sunglass yesterday, for an upcoming interview on EngineerVsDesigner, where he explained that minor modification of the 3D files, along with versioning and simultaneous screen-sharing (think Google Docs for 3D) is now also possible.

Here’s one shot of a SketchUp model imported into the Sunglass Web UI.



Text is taken from http://solidsmack.com/resources/sunglass-io-plugin-solidworks-rhino-sketchup/

>Totally agree! It's just a viewer, and I was quite surprised by everyone's reaction to this, everyone! Just chill! I'm not suggesting MoI to be a web app at all and I'm not one for cloud computing either, some online storage is pretty handy but it look's like they call that 'cloud computing' too, new buzz word for sure.

When I posted this my only thought was; It'll be cool to have a Web collaboration viewer for MoI, since Sunglass was releasing the API.


My 2c.

Still not convinced about WebGL coolness ? Then I guess you have to click http://madebyevan.com/webgl-path-tracing/

also check http://p3d.in/ another WebGL-based 3D viewer.

Michael since they have a plugin Rhino do you think it maybe easier to cook one for MoI also?

Since 3D PDF export support is not likely to happen for MoI, that maybe a good alternative, NO?

Hi adamio, have you been using it yet? Is it working well for you, have you actually used it to send information to someone else?

How does the editing part work - do you know if Sunglass takes actual CAD data like 3DM, STEP, or IGES files or does it only work with polygon data only?


> When I posted this my only thought was; It'll be cool to have a Web collaboration viewer
> for MoI, since Sunglass was releasing the API.

Ok, but can't you use MoI with it already? It seems to say that it has integration with Dropbox - does that mean that if you save a model file into a particular folder in Dropbox that it will auto upload that? If that's the case then just save from MoI into that one particular folder and then BAM! you're using MoI with Sunglass right there, aren't you?

What is it in particular that you hope to gain by a plug-in instead of that?


> Still not convinced about WebGL coolness ? Then I guess you have to click http://madebyevan.com/webgl-path-tracing/

That's definitely cool! Cool and useful are fairly different things though.

How is it going to work to use WebGL for a viewer when WebGL does not function at all on Internet Explorer or the iPad?


> Michael since they have a plugin Rhino do you think it maybe easier to cook one for MoI also?

Not really - MoI does not implement Rhino's plug-in interface, MoI only implements a file reader for reading the Rhino 3DM file format. File formats and plug-in APIs are pretty different things.



> Since 3D PDF export support is not likely to happen for MoI, that maybe a good alternative, NO?

It might be as long as you know the person receiving it does not use Internet Explorer.

I don't understand why you make it sound like you can't use MoI with it already though - can't you just upload files you generate from MoI using one of their general purpose file upload tools?

Why is it that you think that a special plug-in is required in order to just upload a file to their service?

- Michael

What is the big difference between GrabCAD and other ones ?
Works fine in Chrome, Firefox, Safari

Seems it don't make yet the convert of files, you must send your file in different formats ?
See some models inside the 3Dspace without problem :)

I donwload without problem inside Moi some Model and put some joyous color with the script by Michael ;)
script: /* Radom Styles to solids*/ var styles = moi.geometryDatabase.getObjectStyles(); var breps = moi.geometryDatabase.getObjects().getBReps(); var style_index = 0; for ( var i = 0; i < breps.length; ++i, ++style_index ) { if ( style_index == styles.length ) { style_index = 0; } var brep = breps.item(i); brep.styleIndex = style_index; }



Model and video by Nayla Miana http://grabcad.com/nayla.miana?page=1

Update, Sunglass is out of Beta.

https://sunglass.io/

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Hello,

Creators of content usually want to hold ownership over the content until complete (and the check doesn't bounce). I think it's a bit of a stretch to say this is a serious collaborative technology. Aside from the whole data mining issue, there is no such thing as "web based" and "secure". I also think it's a point solution in that there are specific files that can be placed in the framework, with that limitation companies cannot get the complete project picture. I can see a group screen share with a call bridge being more effective and secure than this technology. If your security and auditing requirements are more strict there are existing solutions that handle that quite well. I do tinker with the VSR WebGL plugin for Rhino, if I was going to send something out I'd use that before 3D PDF.